The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  Contact with other researchers was mostly made through genealogical websites, where your family tree can be made available to others if you wish. I found some contacts via the archivist at Harrods Store, who gets letters from time to time from Harrod family ‘wannabes’. Over the years I have developed a relationship with several of the Harrods archivists, and the letters are now often sent on to me to sort out and answer. Most of them hope that they, like us, were related to the ‘Harrods of Knightsbridge’. Sadly, this is seldom the case, but each contact raises the possibility for me that further connections with our tree might be discovered.

  William Harrod was my great-great-great-grandfather and was born in about 1767. His birth details have never been found and the birthdate is a calculation back from later dates in his life and from his given age at death. He was an exciseman (or tax collector and enforcer), and spent his working life initially in Suffolk and later in Essex. He may not have been the only family member working with the excise; as another, seemingly unlinked Harrod, George Gateland Harrod, a resident of Southwark, also worked in the Excise Office in London. If they were related, the Southwark connection might also have decided Charles Henry’s choice of district for his first shop.

  William worked with the excise for twenty years, five years in Suffolk between 1792 and 1797, and fifteen years in Essex between 1797 and 1812. He died in 1812, perhaps during the course of his work. Despite hundreds of hours on the case, and visits to Suffolk and Essex, I have not been able to find his birthplace or parents. There were initially some reasons to believe that he may have his origins in London or close by, and only moved elsewhere with his work. Despite the research in Suffolk, Essex and Southwark, and more recently in Lincolnshire and Ireland, no definite record of his birth or baptism has been found, so no more distant ancestors have been discovered. A William Harrod of the right vintage in Lincolnshire looked promising for a while but lived out his life as a schoolmaster. The right William must be out there somewhere!

  At the present moment, the villages in north-east Suffolk, just south of Lowestoft, seem the most likely bet for his birthplace. There are a clutch of Harrods around Thetford, Wangford and Blything in that part of Suffolk. There are also some at Henstead, and the surrounding villages of Barsham and Benacre. The National Gravestones Index records Harrods at the nearby villages of Kirkly, Rushmere and Worlingham – this part of England seems to be full of them. Situated in south-east Suffolk, Shotley is just north of the Stour Estuary, and the parish records there include a William Harrod as a taxpayer, but give no date.

  So, what led William to start work for the excise at the age of 25 is a mystery. In the late eighteenth century, excise and customs were separate organisations with different tasks. Where they overlapped, such as with imported goods, there was often much rivalry and, not infrequently, skulduggery. An exciseman, sometimes called a ‘gauger’, was employed by the government in what today would be the joint HM Customs & Excise, to ensure that people paid their taxes. Gauger, pronounced ‘gay-jer’, comes from the old French ‘jaugier’, or someone who measures.

  They were also known by the name ‘collectors’, and rode together on horseback in groups referred to as a ‘ride’, as part of a county, a ‘collection’. It was not an occupation that was valued by ordinary people, and it would be fair to say that the excise men of this era were, to say the least, unpopular, and that attitudes towards them were ambivalent. Followers of Poldark will understand this! Many people, especially those living near the coast, were either involved in, dependent upon, or turned a blind eye to the proceeds of smuggling and contraband. As a consequence of this situation, excise men were often employed away from their home area so as to avoid any conflict of interest or retribution.

  The Board of Excise is not as ancient as Customs. A Board of Excise was established by the Long Parliament, and excise duties first levied in 1643. The Board of Excise was merged with the existing Board of Taxes and Board of Stamps to create the new Board of Inland Revenue in 1849.

  Excise duties are inland duties levied on articles at the time of their manufacture, such as alcoholic drinks and tobacco, but duties have also been levied in the past on salt, paper and windows. As the excise became increasingly well organised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the governments of the time started collecting excise duty on a wide range of goods. The numbers of officers also increased, partly helped by a small rise in their previously miserable pay. They took on ‘supernumeraries’, whose job it was to act as a clerk for the collector.

  Famous excise officers include Robert Burns, the poet, and Thomas Paine, who later emigrated to America and became involved in the Independence movement. Though Robert Burns, who worked for the excise for eight years in Dumphries, found the work was relatively well paid, he was not totally comfortable in his profession. He was a diligent tax collector, and had to travel on horseback many hundreds of miles each week in pursuit of his duties, ‘Five days in the week, or four at least I must be on horseback and very frequently thirty or forty miles ere I return; besides four different kinds of book-keeping to post every day.’ He illustrates this part of his life in his poem, The Devil’s Awa wi’ th’ Exciseman (The Devil has Taken the Exciseman):

  The deil cam fiddlin’ thro’ the town,

  And danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,

  And ilka wife cries, ‘Auld Mahoun,

  I wish you luck o’ the prize, man’.

  [Chorus]

  The deil’s awa, the deil’s awa,

  The deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman,

  He’s danc’d awa, he’s danc’d awa,

  He’s danc’d awa wi’ the Exciseman.

  We’ll mak our maut, and we’ll brew our drink,

  We’ll laugh, sing, and rejoice, man,

  And mony braw thanks to the meikle black deil,

  That danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman.

  The deil’s awa, &c.

  There’s threesome reels, there’s foursome reels,

  There’s hornpipes and strathspeys, man,

  But the ae best dance ere came to the land

  Was-the deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman.

  The deil’s awa, &c.

  The job was not without its dangers, and at times the collectors carried large amounts of money, so were usually armed. On other occasions, they might meet resistance to pay or attempts at retribution when the trader felt aggrieved. Did this happen to William?

  William Harrod married Tamah Mason on 18 September 1794, in Hartest, a village situated in the triangle between Clare, Long Melford and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. He was 27 years old and she was 18. Their banns of marriage were published on three consecutive Sundays – 10, 17 and 24 August. Both were listed in the Hartest parish records as ‘of this Parish’, though there is no evidence that William lived in Hartest for any length of time.

  The witnesses were Edmund Coe and Hannah Pettit, both members of local families. There is a Hannah Pettit to be found in the parish records; she was baptised in Hartest in 1779, so would have been 15 years old at the time of Tamah’s marriage. William’s wife signed the register of marriage as ‘Tamah’. She was recorded as ‘Thamar’ on the baptism entry for one of her children and ‘Tamar’ on the baptism entries for the rest of her children and in the register of her burial in Kelvedon, Essex. Her own signature as ‘Tamah’ seems likely to be the most accurate one.

  The whole area around Hartest is on the edge of Constable country and much of the countryside looks like his paintings. It was one of the regions of the country where Nonconformist and Quaker activity increased during that time, and many Huguenots also came to live in the area. It does look, from their marriage and the children’s baptisms, as though William and Tamah were Nonconformists, despite the parish entries.

  No photographs of William or Tamah have ever been found – not surprising given their dates.

  At the time of their marriage in Hartest, William had been working for eighteen months on the nearb
y Clare Ride in south-west Suffolk. Long enough, one presumes, to meet a local girl. Prior to this, as his first post with the excise, he was on the Saxmundham Ride, about 30 miles away to the north-east, as a ‘supernumerary’. Saxmundham is about 20 miles south of Lowestoft and is not too far away from those Suffolk villages mentioned earlier. It would seem logical that his first job, though not actually in his home area, would be in the same county.

  Hartest is a delightful Suffolk village, with a large triangular village green, a lovely simple church, and a pub which, prior to the 1830s, was a small manor house. The village is about 6 miles north of Clare, which is just on the Suffolk side of the Essex/Suffolk border. Clare is a small town with some seriously ancient houses and an enormous church. It had been a prosperous town since the Middle Ages and was heavily involved in the local wool and cloth trade, being especially renowned for its broad cloth until the 1600s, when different types of cloth began to be made and gradually took over.

  I have assumed that William met Tamah during his time in the area and that she was local, despite the lack of any documentary evidence apart from the marriage banns. There are certainly a number of Mason families in the Hartest area, mostly poor families; the majority being agricultural labourers. No connection between Tamah and any of these families has yet been found. The village records of Hartest also show many Pettit families in the area, including a few Hannah Pettits, who might have been the witness, and in addition show the existence of an Edmund Coe who was probably the other witness. There was a family with three successive Edmund Coes living in the Hartest area; the most likely one would have been aged 51 at the time of the marriage, which would, however, seem to be a little old to be a friend of the young couple. There were still Pettits in the area a century later, as the war memorial on the green at Hartest reveals.

  The Kelvedon records reveal that Tamah Harrod died on 16 June 1811; her age is given as 35. This confirms that she was about 17 or 18 at the time of her marriage and would suggest she was born in 1776. No other records have been found for her in the Hartest parish records, or any relevant baptism records in the surrounding parishes. There were plenty of other Masons in Clare, Hartest and nearby parishes, which suggests that she was probably from a local family, but none can be linked to Tamah and no burial records have been found for her possible parents.

  William died in the year following Tamah’s death, 1812. His age, given as 43 years, makes his year of birth around 1767. Although their burials are listed in the parish records, no sign of a gravestone for either William or Tamah was found during a visit to Kelvedon Church. A search of the local chapel records, just in case, was also fruitless.

  There are several possible reasons. They may have been buried in a Nonconformist cemetery further afield, and listed only for legal reasons in the parish records. As William and Tamah died within a few months of each other, it is possible that they died in an epidemic, and so might have been buried in mass graves; although this is less likely. Perhaps they were too poor to afford stone gravestones. Death at the age of 43 was not that uncommon for a man at that time, most diseases being untreatable. The possibility that he died in the pursuit of his occupation is possible, but no local newspapers have listed any such event.

  Many details of William’s life as an excise man were supplied by Mary Rance, a fellow Harrod researcher. She is related to the other excise-employed Harrod in the records, George Gateland Harrod. She had written for information to the archivist at Harrods in 2000 and they had passed her letter on to me. She had researched the Harrod and related Digby families in order to see if her Harrod relatives were included in the Harrods family. We have corresponded frequently since then and eventually met when I visited the Essex Records Office in Chelmsford. (By coincidence, her husband David was, for twenty years, the personnel director at Freshfields, the City law firm where our eldest daughter worked for several years.)

  Mary’s research, based on the Minute Books of the Excise Board, London, held at the National Archives in Kew, supplied the details of his working life. The records show that excise officers changed posts every few years, presumably to reduce collusion with the locals and corruption:

  Collection Book 383. 3/5/1792 – David Jones, Examiner being by minute of the 27th ultimo appointed Supervisor of Portsmouth District, ordered that William Harrod filled the Supernumerary vacancy on Mr Whiske’s Motion of Suffolk. [Presumably David Jones had just been appointed as Portsmouth Supervisor, hence the rather odd geographical juxtaposition].

  Collection Book 386. 27/2/1793 – that William Harrod, Officer of Saxmundham 2nd Ride exchange stations with John Colmer, Officer of Clare 3rd Ride, Suffolk. [William had progressed from supernumerary to Officer within ten months. Did he move to Clare in order to be nearer to Tamah, or did he meet her after the move? He eventually stayed there for four years.]

  Collection Book 402. 19/5/1797 – that William Harrod, Officer of Clare 3rd Ride, Suffolk move to become Officer of Bury 2nd Ride, same Collection, exchanging with James King. [A stay of eleven weeks.]

  Collection Book 403. 2/8/1797 – that William Harrod Officer of Bury Ride, succeed James Scutt as Officer, Grays Ride, Essex. [This was a move to the far end of the county of Essex, many miles away. He stayed for seven months.]

  Collection Book 405. 23/2/1798 – that William Harrod succeed William Brown, as Officer of Colchester 3rd Ride, Essex. [This was three years.]

  Collection Book 422. 19/5/1801 – that William Harrod Officer of Colchester 3rd Ride succeed Joseph Meredith as Officer of Manningtree 1st Ride, same Collection. [A stay, again, of three years.]

  Collection Book 448. 15/8/1806 – that William Harrod succeed John Smith as Officer of Colchester 1st Ride when the latter was discharged after many transgressions. [Another five years in the area.]

  Collection. Book 459. 20/6/1808 – that William Harrod exchange with Thomas Howard as Officer of Coggeshall Ride, Essex Collection. [Two years.]

  Collection Book 480. 21/4/1812 – that William Harrod of Coggeshall Ride, being dead, as by letter of 12 Inst. from William Airy, Collector, order that George Clements Officer of Colchester 1st Ride succeed him. [He had worked with the excise for a month short of twenty years.]

  Until a visit to the area in 2008 as a guest of Mary Rance and her husband David, it had looked to me from the records available online as though William and Tamah had had two children: Charles Henry Harrod was born in 1799 in Lexden, and Jane Harrod was born in 1809, at Kelvedon, where she was christened later that year.

  It had seemed rather unusual to me that William and Tamah would have had only two children, as this would have constituted a very small family for the time. There were other factors which made me wary to accept this as fact. It was common practice to name the firstborn son with the same name as that of his father, and also Charles and Jane were ten years apart in birthdates – quite a big gap.

  A search of the parish records at the County Records Offices for Essex in Chelmsford and Suffolk in Bury St Edmunds, for the places where William had worked, proved very fruitful. Three additional children were found and researched, but there was more to be found out later.

  All seems to have been well with the Harrod family of William and Tamah until 1811. William was working on the Coggeshall Ride, now an accomplished officer with nineteen years’ experience in the job. Coggeshall was a village of about 3,000 inhabitants on the River Blackwater between Braintree and Colchester. William and Tamah may not, of course, have lived in Coggeshall itself.

  Tamah died in 1811, followed by William himself ten months later. As discussed earlier, no details are known but the result was that five children aged between 20 months and 16 years old were left as orphans. Charles Henry was just short of his 13th birthday when his father died.

  Putting this period of their lives into some sort of historical context, it was in 1811 that Jane Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility, and the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) was made regent when his father George III was deemed insane.
In 1812, Charles Dickens was born; Napoleon retreated from Moscow and Wellington was fighting the French in the Peninsular War. Britain was fighting on another front in the 1812 war against the fledgling American state, which conflict included the burning of Washington in 1813. Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated, was shot as he entered the House of Commons.

  There is absolutely no evidence of what happened to the remaining young Harrods between 1812 and about 1821, when most of them start to appear in the records in various parts of London. The eldest child, Caroline, was then 17 years old and old enough to look after her siblings, although she would have needed support, both physical and financial. If William died in harness (pun intended), his family may have had a pension granted to help them.

  The Colchester Union Workhouse was not opened until 1837 and much of the support of the homeless and destitute in 1812 would have fallen upon the local parish. There is likely to have been support from Tamah’s family, who were 25 miles away in Hartest, although 25 miles across country in those days for five orphans might have been like an ocean to cross. I do not know the whereabouts of William’s family, but they were likely to have been much farther away.

  My best guess, considering that there was a future connection with a farming and milling family in nearby Birch, the Digbys, was that the Harrods may have been friends of theirs before William and Tamah’s deaths, and that they might have helped them for a while. Birch was only 5 miles away from Coggeshall, and might have been even closer to where the family were living.

  This scenario fits in with several known facts. The Harrods disappeared from the records for nine years or so until 1821 when the eldest two siblings can be found in London, then aged 26 and 24 and presumably fully independent. Charles Henry followed his siblings a couple of years later when he appears in Southwark. Charles Henry married Elizabeth Digby in Birch in 1830, having been living in Southwark since at least 1824. He must have had an opportunity to meet her previously. Birch was such a tiny place that a chance meeting would have been very unlikely.